Art Pie Guilt

Every year, the art department at the university where Brandon teaches hosts a open studio event where student work is displayed on the walls, in the hallways, and in each studio class room.  People from the community and the families of the students come to explore the building, attend the student award ceremony, and eat the free food.  The faculty in each studio area bring some snacks for guests that come to their studios.    

The ceramics studio has a pottery sale and chili, and other folks provide finger foods and Papa Johns pizza, but I bake pies for Brandon's room.  I'm in the pie baking mood this time of year, since I just practiced for Thanksgiving, and I love an excuse to make mass quantities of desserts.  In the photo above, you can see the pretty honey from a Kentucky bee keeper that I used in the pumpkin pie.  

There are other ingredients in these pies that I do not consider to be top quality, and for the first time, I had awareness and misgivings about this.  I bought Pillsbury crusts because I'm lazy baking six pies is feasible on a work night if I save the time of making my own crusts, and its been my experience that only pie crust connoisseurs would even notice the difference.  Actually, the Pillsbury crusts turn out reliably well each time, which is not something I can say for my own crusts.  As I was unrolling the crusts to make the pumpkin pie, I glanced at the ingredient list and saw that these crusts have hydrogenated lard.  Uh-oh.  I didn't even realize that lard could be hydrogenated.  I felt bad putting my pretty pie filling in poisonous crust.     

I did use real butter in the chocolate pie filling instead of a cheaper hydrogenated margarine, but I didn't use butter from pastured cows because I'm cheap so I could save some money.  I also didn't use organic ingredients or pasture raised chicken eggs for the same reason.  I have a little guilt about this.  I always have a little guilt about chocolate pie anyway, since the main ingredient is white sugar.  So, I'm feeding innocent strangers insulin spiking sugar pie with factory farmed ingredients in a toxic crust!!  I need to stop reading nutrition information on the interweb because it's ruining pie for me and making each pie cost three times as much and take three times as much effort to make!

At least the apple pie has real apples, right?  Not organic apples though.  I'm such a cheapskate.  

I felt like putting a warning label on my pie (Beware, Hydrogenated Lard in Crust), or hovering over my pies warning people of the dangers.  Knowledge is a terrible thing.  

To fuel my guilt even more, I made an apple crumble pie for use to eat at home, and made the crust myself, and used the expensive butter.  In my defense, I did practice using the food processor to make this crust, in the hopes that I can perfect a faster technique, and next year make better quality crusts for all the pies.

I know my guilt is self imposed, because the folks at the open studio were scarfing down pizza, crackers, and cookies from boxes, and if I were to mention that the pie crust has hydrogenated lard, cheap eggs, and grain fed butter they probably wouldn't have known why they should care.  Now that I know, I have some responsibility, right?  Even if the people who are eating it don't know or care?  

The pies were so pretty, and so fun to assemble, but my guilt prevented me from being super proud of them, even though they are the same pies I've made before, and every last crumb was gobbled up by the grateful guests.

We gobbled up the pie at home too, even though my home made crust wasn't quite as flaky as the dough boy's crust turned out to be.  When using the food processor it's easy to over mix, I think.  

So next year I need to budget for better pie ingredients, and more time to use those quality ingredients.  Or maybe I should just bring a salad!

I Got Glitter!

After I created my wreath from from the wild grape vine that nearly pulled my house down last summer, I got it in the back of my mind that I should decorate the wreath in some fashion, and hang it on the house to provide some visual interest during this wintry time of year.  Well, it only took one trip down the dollar store holiday decor isle on my quest for paper towels and scotch tape, for the this little wreath decoration desire to bloom into a full blown glittery be-ribboned wreath creation project!  

After investing an entire five dollars on a giant roll of red and gold ribbon, I was more than committed, and found myself outside yesterday in the twilight hours pruning my cedar trees to generate some classic evergreen wreath material.  I filled  a box with ceder twigs, and brought it in the house.  I predicted that wreath decoration on this scale was going to be a messy business, but working inside where it was warm, and where there are refrigerated tasty beverages and snacks, was a more creative atmosphere than outside it the cold darkness.

The kittens were instantly intrigued by this aromatic box of outdoor material, and I had fun teasing them with cedar boughs and jingle bells, even though I knew I was only teaching them to torment my future Christmas tree.   

By the time I made it back outside, in the dark, to retrieve the wreath, the cats were just as committed to this project as I was, and gave the wreath a good sniff'n to make sure it was safe. Ditto, my scaredy cat, was a little on edge at the introduction of so many new toys to play with.  What's the catch?   

I had to clear away the materials from my recent sock creature sewing project in order to make room for the giant wreath on the dining room table, and by the time I was ready to really get started, Jamie was home so I could recruit him into the project.   

With both of the table leaves in, the dinning room table was just big enough for us to lay the wreath on the table and begin to poke the cut ceder branches into the grape vines. 

It really didn't take that long for us to arrange our cedar boughs in our chosen design.  We decided that the grape vines looked so cool, that we should let them be exposed for portions of the wreath, so we created three green nest-like areas, to highlight my dollar store decor.  It was not the best idea to put our beers and snacks on the table with the cedar branches, since later I had to pick twigs from the sour cream and Jamie almost drank three cedar needles in his beverage.  

I couldn't resist taking a photo of one of my saved vegetable twisty ties in use, just so I could prove to Brandon that I am not a hoarder, but a creative person who needs material.  See, without my twisty tie collection, the wreath my never have been born!    

We incorporated some dried lotus pods that I collected this summer, and when we were brainstorming for other wreath additives, Jamie saw the basket of sock monsters.  Eureka!  

The wreath was so big and awkward to hold, that it was hard to know how our design was progressing, but we were pretty sure it was totally awesome and that we may have future career's as a wreath decorating team.  High five, brother!

It didn't fall apart when Jamie carried it outside.  A good sign.

We didn't have a hook near the door where I wanted to hang it, so we fussed around with three sticks until we created a tripod to hang it from, which would be reminiscent of a peace sign.  Of course, I used twisty ties to hold the tripod together, and then covered the ties with a big bow.  Since I unknowing bought seventy feet of ribbon, I was quite generous.  Then we stood back to admire our result.  Hmmm....Uh... I hate to ask this... but, does it look a little bit like a disaster to you?  Yes.

So, we took it's picture with a flash so we could go back in the house to re-asses the design and warm up.  We decided that the problem was all the shaggy cedar boughs and the interior bow.  The wreath didn't look round enough, which seems to be what separates a wreath from a pile, so we removed the middle bow, and the branches that were hanging in the interior of the wreath, as shown in the photo above, which I took this morning.  Much better.  Turns out we may need to do an apprenticeship before we're ready to form that professional wreath decorator team, after all.  

The wreath is a bit large for our small house, maybe, and possibly the rocks we are using to prop up the front stick of tripod could be spiced up a bit.    But really, it was so much fun to make, I'm convinced I would think it looks cool no matter what.

The tripod is made from sticks I pulled from a beaver dam, so they've had all the bark chewed from them and you can see the beaver teeth marks if you look closely.  The grape grew wild in the back yard, of course, and the cedar boughs came from trees that I transplanted to our yard from my neighbors yard when they were about six inches tall.  The lotus pods came from a wetland I visited earlier this year, the sock creature was one I made and kept for myself.  

Of all the pieces of the wreath, though, my favorite are the sparkly red and gold dollar store pine cones.  I didn't realize I was such a sucker for glitter!  It's a good thing too, since I now have glitter on everything in the dinning room, so I'm sure I will get to enjoy the glitter well into the coming year.  It's been a long time since I've been infected with glitter.  I'm sort of excited about that.  

Now that I look at my front porch with the giant wreath by the door, I can see that my front railing could really use a coat of paint and some pretty green garland with red ribbon... oh... and maybe some of those dangling lighted ice sickles from the gutters... I may have to go back to that dollar store!  

Stupid Sock Creature

Several years ago some friends of mine gifted me a book of instructions on how to create creatures from socks.  I have had so much fun from this gift!  Sock creatures are the perfect sewing project for me.  I can make one in one sitting and there are no fancy sewing skills required.  Actually, the more crooked my seams, the more character my creatures seem to have.  

If you've ever seen my giant basket of unmatched socks, then you know how much I love socks and how hard it is for me to part with them, even when I've been waiting for the mate to show up for ages.  Seriously, where do they go?  What to do with those great socks that no longer have a partner, or are no longer in favor?  Turn them into monsters, of course.   

I've made a few stupid sock creatures with my sewing machine, but for this creature I just used a needle and thread, and I must say that I did not miss the inevitable frustration that comes from my out-of-practice sewing machine operation skills.  All I needed to make this little guy was some nice music, a couple of sleeping kittens in my lap, and a tasty beverage.  

The most exciting part was stuffing him and seeing the sad little shell of sewn together sock bits inflate into a little creature.  

Then comes the really fun part - sewing funny lips from what was the heal of the sock, and adding some details, like a goofy tongue and some button eyes.  I will not admit to you how many button combinations I pinned on his face before I settled on these mismatched ones.  Button eye selection is a skill I must practice to master.     

The only problem with enjoying making sock creatures is finding homes for them.  Over the years, I've gifted some to kids of my friends and family, but I can't say that the kids ever thought they were as neat as I did, and I can only house so many sock dolls before I start to give myself weird looks.  However, when my nieces where at my house for Thanksgiving, my youngest niece came to ask me if she could play with the toys in a basket in my room.  When I realized she was asking about my personal collection of sock creatures, I couldn't have been more excited.  Finally, a kid has shown some interest!   And just in time for Christmas, too.  

My niece seemed to think it was particularly hilarious to pretend the sock creatures were licking Brandon in the face, so I made sure this creature has a giant floppy tongue.  Poor kid, she doesn't know that she's destined for a future full of used sock gifts!

Flying Plants and Liberated Mushrooms

Puck and I just happened upon these milkweed seeds blowing from their pods as we took a walk on our local walking trail.  I took these pictures several weeks ago, but every time I scan through my cell phone photos I pause on these to marvel at this process.  

It was a very windy day, and the as the breeze made the naked stalks and pods sway, the milkweed fluff and the attached seed slowly expanded from the pods and began to fluff in the wind.  

During more violent gusts, individual fluff balls would detach from the pod with their delicate strands of fluff fully expanded, and float away on the current.  I love to think of these seeds traveling on the wind and landing in new territory.  Plants can fly!

I also took some photos of the these pretty orange mushrooms, which my mushroom hunter friend says might be called Jack O'Lanterns (Omphalotus sp.).  If these are jack o'lanterns, then they may glow in the dark!  I've seen fungus glowing in the dark before, when working in the forests at night, but the kind I saw only illuminated rotten wood when it was stepped on, or disturbed, and I was told it's called fox fire.  It was really wild to walk through the forest and look back to see my foot steps glowing!  I thought I was seeing things, and it wasn't until the guy I was working with asked me if I could see it too, that I believed my eyes.  I think we both sat in the dark thinking we were going crazy for a quite a while before he was brave enough to bring it up.  It was such a relief when he finally did. 

If you look closely on the fallen leaves under these mushrooms you can see the orange spoors that have fallen from the mushroom gills above.  I tried to do some very quick interweb research on how mushrooms reproduce, which you wouldn't think would be more than one wikipedia page away from a google search bar, and quickly realized that mushroom sex is not easy to understand by the average amateur mushroom cell phone photographer, like me.  What I came away with, is that those spores under the mushroom can grow into new mushrooms, like seeds do, but that doesn't mean that the mushroom parent hooked up with another mushroom.  They can make their own spores without a partner, or some can be their own partner, or some can partner up and create a mushrooms with genes from both.  Mushrooms have a very liberated attitude when it comes to reproduction.   

Wild Grape Vine to Wonky Grape Wreath

I made a giant grape vine wreath!  Or, at least I made a giant circle from grape vines, but I'm not convinced it qualifies for official wreath status yet.  A few weeks ago Brandon and I took a day off from farm house renovations and dedicated an entire Saturday to some much need garden and yard clean up.  We cut down the asparagus, disassembled the bean teepee, and rolled up all the bits of chicken wire that I use for chicken proofing my garden beds.  Once the garden beds were cleaned up, we raked leaves from under our big silver maple and used them to mulch all the garden beds, and then laid the tomato cages on the leaves to keep the chickens from scratching up the leaf mulch. It really did feel like tucking the garden away for the winter.  

The picture above is from the end of the summer.  As you can see, the back porch was over grown by the wisteria on the right side of the photo, and wild grape vine on the left side of the photo, which, when I stopped trimming it, grew up the side of the house.  

Not only did the wild grape vine grow up the side of the house near the porch and back door, it then spread along the wall to cover nearly the entire back side of the house, studio window, kitchen window, part of the roof, and then extended along the cables that run to the house from a telephone pole.  I thought it was awesome.  

I knew Brandon would not think it was awesome if he ever noticed how it was pulling the siding off the house, workings its way under the roofing, and blocking the sun light from his studio window.  Fortunately for the grape vine, he never paid any attention to it all summer, even though he had to practically duck under it on his way out the back door.  I knew the vine had overstepped it's bounds, so I was prepared for the severe trimming it was going to get once Brandon tuned in to it's presence.

Once Brandon started to really look at the vine during our clean up day, he responded to the grape vine's aggressive attempt to dominate our house with some aggressiveness of his own, and pulled it from the house cut the whole thing down to the ground! Bad, bad grape vine!

While Brandon cursed the vines tenacity and struggled to remove it from the telephone wires, I collected the longest pieces from his work and began to assemble my wreath.  I may have been overly ambitious, because making a wreath this big made it very hard to get it in a round shape.  

When I showed Puck my progress, I could tell that he was very worried about the non-circular condition of my wreath.  I tried to get him to jump through the wreath, lion tamer style, but he just gave me a look and sent me off to play with the silly chickens.

Mrs. Hall seemed willing to entertain the idea, but June kept her distance.  I could tell that I would need many kernels of corn and more time than I had left to accomplish the chicken through the wreath trick.  

By the time I got tired of finished it, I had at least added enough vines that the wreath was semi circular.  I think I could really dress it up with some ever green boughs and some pine cones or berries, even if it is a bit wonky.  

This vine doesn't get edible grapes, but it does have pretty little curling tendrils that help it attach to things.  I think they look very nice, and was excited to get to keep some of them by making my wreath.  Judging by the progress the vine made this summer, I don't have any concern that it won't recover from Brandon's pruning, and I'm already looking forward to Brandon's expression at the end of next summer when he realizes that the vine he cut down is back where it started!

Pink Sauerkraut Friends

One of my friends and coworkers recently attended the Wise Traditions, Weston A. Price Foundation annual meeting.  She wrote about her trip here.  I've fallen down the rabbit hole of the inter-web many times and found myself landing on the Weston A Price website. During these informational journeys, I've noticed that lots of folks are beginning to pay attention to some of the principles outlined there, like eating live food, such as sauerkraut, yogurt, raw cheese, kombucha, and keffir, and avoiding sugar and un-soaked grains and eating lots of bone broths and healthy animal fats and other healthy fats, like coconut oil.  Because the nutritional education offered by the Weston A. Price Foundation is contrary to so many of our long held beliefs about food (what? I can eat butter?!), I find it all very interesting, and since my friend and I spend lots of time driving to project sites, we get to share our thoughts about our kitchen experiments as we try making food in new (to us) ways.  We're getting a reputation among our coworkers as always talking about food.  Weird food.    

Not that sauerkraut is weird, even when it purple like my recent batch, but making sauerkraut does take planning and time, and there are many variations of method to pick from, so it's nice to have friends who are trying it too, so we can compare experiences.  

For this batch, I used less salt than I ever have before, and instead of using a plate and a jar to hold the cabbage in the juice, I filled a gallon zip lock bag with water and let it lay on the top of the kraut.  It worked wonderfully, and was much easier to use than the plate and jar.  The only problem I had is that my manner-less kitten thought I created a water bed that was just her size and I caught her taking a nap on top of my kraut!  Thank goodness I had a towel draped over it.  

If the goal is to eat some live food every day, then I need to keep making weird fermented foods so we can have a variety to pick from.  Have you had your dose of kraut today?  

There is Farm House Progess

I've noticed a difference in how we talk about our farm house renovation these days.  We used to focus on the work ahead, the next stage in the process, and never really dwell on a timeline since it seemed pointless to pressure ourselves when we had no idea how long each task would take.  But these day, we are beginning to discuss the beginning of the end.  We even tentatively set a move in month - June, to inspire us to work a little faster.  I think this means that we can see the end of the road, but it could also mean that we've been spending all our spare time working on this project for nearly two years, and we are looking forward to shifting focus away from the house on onto something else too.  

There is still lots of work to look forward to, for sure, but if I think of our work in layers, starting on the outside of the house and working in, we've accomplished the weather barriers of siding and roof, the structural carpentry of rebuilding the walls, floors, stairs, and windows, the inner circuitry of the house including the plumbing and electricity, and now we are so close to finishing the fluffy inner layer of insulation that I can taste it (it tastes like foam and fiberglass!).  The ceilings should be finished in just a few more work days too, and we've gotten a good start on the inside shell, the drywall.  Then the fun begins, right?  Detailed carpentry for trim, cabinets, columns, and the messy stuff like spackle, paint, and caulk.  

I was about to say that the insulation installation has been the worst part of this project when it comes to enjoyable tasks, and then I thought back to those many days of scooping out giant piles of rubble from the plaster wall demolition, and realized that the insulation isn't really all that bad!  Oh, and I nearly forgot the knee pain of laying tile, and the struggles we had working around the low beams when installing the upstairs ceiling.  Okay, I take it back.  It's all equally fun.  

We took advantage of Jamie's volunteer labor this weekend, and bought sixteen sheets of drywall while he was there to help us load it.  They didn't get more than five of those sheets on the wall, but Brandon made sure they tackled all the most difficult to reach places while he had stronger arms than mine to help him.  We celebrated our accomplishments with pizza and poker, right there in the middle of the construction zone.  Joe and Ashley brought the baby and Ashley's mom, and we all sat around our scruffy work table in lawn chairs and played poker by clamp light.  This house is already so much fun.